Digital photography is steadily growing in popularity. Digital photography offers several advantages over film photography: photos are available immediately, there are no costs for film or processing, and digital images can be instantly shared with anyone via electronic transmission. Despite these advantages, enjoyment of digital photographs is limited because the common viewing medium is the computer monitor. Digital photography is not likely to reach its full potential as long as people need to stand around a computer in order to enjoy their photos.
Digital photos can also be printed, much like conventional film photos. However, producing good quality prints from digital photos requires expensive printers and printer supplies.
Digital camera manufacturers have long recognized an alternative way to enjoy digital photos: to view the photos on a standard TV set. Most digital cameras have TV output capability, allowing the photographer to view recently captured images on their TV set. Unfortunately, using a digital camera to view images on TV has many drawbacks. For example, only those images presently stored in the camera can be viewed. In addition, the camera must be available at each viewing location, and cables must be reconnected for each viewing session. Further, there is no remote control capability and video images produced by digital camera technology are generally poor in quality. In addition, the high cost of digital cameras makes this option impractical for sharing photos with friends and relatives.
Viewing digital photos on TV sets presents a tremendous opportunity for the digital photography industry, because there are some 250 million TVs in 100 million households in the United States alone. Many of these households would be able to enjoy digital photos on their TV sets if there were a simple, inexpensive way to make this possible.